It’s now been two weeks since the passage of what many thought was the legislative equivalent of pigs flying, hell freezing over, and the Chicago Cubs winning the World Series all happening at the same time: Michigan became the 24th state in the union to enact a “right to work” law.

If it can happen in Michigan, it can happen anywhere — even in my home state of Ohio. But from all appearances, if the Buckeye State succeeds in going the “right to work” route, it won’t be because of anything the state’s governor or Republican establishment leadership does.

Contrary to what opponents say, “right to work” is only “anti-union” if you believe that the closed shop is some kind of neutral management-labor arrangement. It’s not. Unions claiming to represent their workers can assess whatever level of dues they wish, hire as many administrative and activist cronies as they wish, and spend their members’ dues pretty much as they wish. Much of the time, their “work” involves lavish outlays and activities which have little or no direct relationship to worker representation. A recent Heritage Foundation analysis of government reports showed that “less than a quarter (24.1 percent) of expenditures by Michigan’s 25 largest private sector (or public/private hybrid) union locals go towards actually representing workers.” Much of the other three-quarters goes to unjustifiable salaries for union bosses and their administrative help which often run well into six figures, expensive junkets they call “business meetings,” and, of course, massive contributions in both money and boots on the ground to labor-sympathetic politicians.

In a closed shop, workers who don’t like what their union is doing can’t resign from the union without losing their jobs. Withholding payment of dues isn’t an option either, at least not without an expensive, protracted fight, because employers almost invariably must deduct dues from workers’ paychecks under the union contract. Thanks to the Supreme Court’s 1988 Communications Workers of America vs. Beckruling, workers can demand a return of “funds collected from them on activities unrelated to collective-bargaining activities.” But because the federal government and virtually no states have codified the Beck ruling into law, workers must attempt to collect individually, while resource-rich unions are free to drag out and otherwise resist such requests.

Contrary to media reports which claim that the term is misleading — reports which are often prepared by journalists who are themselves union members — “right to work” perfectly describes what laws outlawing the closed shop accomplish. Employees can negotiate with prospective employers for their services without having to join whatever union may represent some of a location’s workers. That is, they now have the “right to work” anywhere their services are desired. In turn, employers have the right to hire workers who choose to join or not to join a union, even if many of their workers are already represented by one.

Heaven knows that Michigan had to do something to reverse its past ten years of deterioration. In the first eight of those years under Democratic Governor Jennifer Granholm, the state lost almost 580,000 jobs and saw its population shrink. While per-capita income in the rest of the U.S. went up by about 5 percent, Michigan’s barely budged. In October, the state’s seasonally adjusted unemployment rate — which peaked at an incredible 14.2 percent under Granholm — was still 9.1 percent and stagnating.

51 Comments, 12 Threads

Unions were born for many good reasons.Now an obvious function is to help secure a job during our employee invasion over the Mexican border.Job security is paramount when raising a family,even if most of the dues are pissed away! Big government tries to help with unemployment benefits,welfare and food stamps but then we just have two problems.100 workers for every one job will bring this country down and neither party wants to solve it!

You think so? Trade unions have always existed to prevent workers from entering the workforce, that is, to keep new workers from competing against the existing workforce.

One of the earliest “union labels” in the United States proclaimed that a brand of cigars wasn’t made with any “negro or indian” labor – i.e. whites only! You think that’s a good reason to have a union? I suppose it is if you’re a White Supremecist.

Trade Unions bar entry into the labor market, prevent competition (keep labor prices artificially high), and ensure the cost of what consumers purchase is higher and lower quality than it could be.

Really it’s only the private sector where I care about developing stronger unions, if only to create a contractual tie between wages and productivity and stop the Great Divergence.

And yes, I take the income inequality problem seriously. You can call me communist and socialist and unpatriotic and immature and unrealistic all you want – your juvenile labels and bullying aren’t going to shut me up. You are, however, perfectly welcome to come to a Great Divergence discussion and give a rational argument about why we shouldn’t care about income-divergent forces at work in our labor markets, our political mechanism and our cultural values.

Our side of the ditch is no better served by our bumper-sticker slogans about free markets when everyone who can fog a mirror knows that markets are neither free nor fair. It is very difficult to explain to your workforce or to much of the public why the Biz School Whiz Kid with the Ivy League paper on the wall and good connections should be paid tens or hundreds of millions a year in salary and bonuses while shrinking the company and laying off $30 -$40K/year production and administrative employees. Likewise in my area of public sector collective bargaining it is a hard road to explain why you want concessions from the employees and wage cuts or freezes on delivery of service and infrastructure employees while they’re surrounded by political appointees making many multiples of what the employees make, who have no qualifications other than friend of the governor, and have no discernible job.

The Republican Party has become the party of small business, tradespeople, and non-government, non-union professionals and production employees, yet at least at the leadership level we still hew to the line of big business and Wall Street. In today’s world, big business is the enemy of Main Street and the people who make their living there. Big business doesn’t want free enterprise or free trade, it wants a government enforced monopoly or oligopoly, strong barriers to entry, and a government subsidy. Both Wall Street and big business repaid the Republicans for their support by bolting to the communists for the promise that the communists would only destroy their competition, not destroy them.

There’s only so long the Country can run on a governmental and managerial policy of, “we cheat the other guy and pass the savings on to you.” We price our resources out of the competition with regulations and then buy resources from places with no environmental safeguards. We lay off our production employees and outsource to Third World sweatshops. Only if your industry has an “in” with the government can you survive here any longer. There are high wages in aerospace and defense, for the moment anyway, but only the government can afford $20B airplanes. There are high wages in regulated utilities and public construction but energy costs are hamstringing the economy and public infrastructure is delapidated because even government can barely afford union project labor agreements and Davis-Bacon wages.

At some point we have to seriously look at the notion of somebody in America making money other than stock traders and investment bankers trading in abstract instruments that are only worth something because somebody believes they are – for the moment. So-called veture capitalists and the “private equity” firms are as often truly vulture capitalists as saviors because they don’t care how they make money; doing a few facial things to jack up the stock price, take their winnings in the market, and leave the wither husk of the company to be cleaned up as a Superfund site – and we’ve all seen at least as much of that as we’ve seen companies live to fight another day. And at some point, our true private sector workforce becomes so underutilized and underpaid that the bulk of American workers can no longer even afford Chinese junk. We’re not far from that now unless you work in the public sector or in the government-dependent Third Sector.

Crony capitalism isn’t capitalism at all – it’s fascist big-government corruption, similar to the way in which the economy of the Third Reich was run. The difference is that ours is less efficient because it is considerably bigger.

Hey, if you look at first causes, clearly the problem is that we allow government to pick winners and losers. Prevent that, and your bogey man BIG BUSINESS goes away.

That is, big businesses won’t go away, but the ones who have an unfair, government-backed advantage will go away. You’re so totally in the weeds of the details of non-issues on this issue, it’s painful to listen to all the wasted energy you expend.

Focus on the problem, the government connection. As opposed to the size of a company and the motivations of those who run said company.

Last I checked, envy was one of the seven deadly sins, and was specifically prohibited in the Ten Commandments.

Envy isn’t “I wish I owned ____” (fill in the blank with a material object). That may be the laudable desire to earn a living; when it involves an excessive fixation on material things at the expense of all else, it’s the sin of greed. But it isn’t envy.

Envy is “Someone else has _____ and I don’t. Because I don’t have it, I want to take it away from that person, or even destroy it, so that they no longer have it.”

Bless you, Jeff. Glad to see I’m not the only one who thinks Alert! Alert! Utopian Viewpoint Based On One Guy’s Annoyance Regarding Basic Human Characteristics every time I see the phrase income equality.

If you’re worried about the poor, then please be concerned with peoples’ ability in a society to rise or fall through income levels, as opposed to what those levels are relative to other people. There will always be those luckier than others, or harder working than others. That’s a fact of life.

The problem is when luck and hardwork aren’t enough to change your status. When you have that in a society, you have a broken government.

Income divergence is very often a good thing. There will always be some people with no or very little income: wealthy retirees or the semi-retired, recent graduates with little work experience (yet), and the temporarily unemployed. There will also be a few lazy, stupid, or ill. If the difference between these at the perpetual low and, and the highest earners is small, that means little wealth is being generated anywhere in society, no technological leaps are occurring, or they are not generating economic gains in society.

We WANT new technologies or innovations to bring top earners enormous gains, because those gains enrich society generally. Those gains necessarily increase the gap between the bottom and the top earners.

What we want, is for no one to be a bottom rate earner for very long. A few months of unemployment, and then a better job; a couple years learning a trade or profession, and then a happy productive life; that sort of thing.

Most people are low or bottom-rate earners in their youth, middle class through their productive years, and a majority are even wealthy by the time they reach old age. Divergence is good — as long as few or none are stuck in the low end their whole lives. As long as America remains a land of liberty, few are.

“If the difference between these at the perpetual low and, and the highest earners is small, that means little wealth is being generated anywhere in society, no technological leaps are occurring, or they are not generating economic gains in society.”

This! Bravo!

Imagine a land where, no matter how talented or skilled you are, it matters not what you do, because your earnings will be similar to everyone e4lse’s. Why would you make all the extra e4ffort required just to make a wee bit more? Why take the necessary risks for so little reward?

This is how it has been throughout most of history in most of the world. It was always whom you knew, not what you knew. America was the rare exception to this primitive, tribalistic system. America was about merit. Vast fortunes were made by those with real skill and work ethic. America was an enlightened place with an advanced system called merit. That’s why the great majority of the world’s advances came from our paltry 6% of the world’s population.

Now, we are reverting to primitive thinking and primitive economics. Leftists do not understand how things really work, and they are taken in by jingoistic things like “income inequality”. They do not undertstand that income inequality stems from skil and work and risk inequality. They see only the rewards of the effort, not the effort itself, so they see the wealth as “undeserved”. They think such “undeserved” wealth should be taken away and given to the “less fortunate”.

In reality, though, that sense of “undeserved” stems from covetousness. Coveting leads to stealing. Stealing will lead to murder. So, God proscribes these primitve passions. Thou shalt not covet, nor steal, nor murder. Christianity teaches us to rise above our base nature. It civililzes us. It teaches us to rejoice in another’s prosperity, rather than resent it. We do not envy someone else’s success, but rather, we count our own blessings. We thank God for all the things we have, rather than resent our neighbor for what we don’t have. Love thy neighbor as thyself, and you will no longer worry about “income inequality”.

The post WWII era was wide open for unions, because the U.S. had no competition. Europe, especially the economic powerhouse of Germany and Japan were destroyed. So the unions could pretty much demand anything and get it. We could make the products and charge any price and the market would buy it. But the world has changed and unions make business uncompetive. Its not just the high wages and benefits, but the payroll padding and the whole job of administering the “contract” and the inches thick rule book. Too much bureacracy and too little actual production. In the end, the market will rule, if allowed.

Actually from the passage of the National Labor Relations Act in ’35 through WWII was the heydey of the unions. War Production pretty much unionized the entire workforce with defense contracts that were pretty much what we’d now call project labor agreements. Even with all the guarantees and government support the unions behaved badly and many were outright communist. The backlash was quick and Republicans took control of the Congress in ’48 with a campaign theme of “Had Enough?” The signal achievement of that Congress was passage of the Taft-Hartley Amendments to the NLRA, which it renamed as the Labor-Management Relations Act and which instilled some balance into what had been a VERY union-friendly law. Old union hands still cry in their beer when they think of Taft-Hartley and none of them will refer to the law as the LMRA.

You’re right about the US having no competition in the World until well into the ’60s but union bad behavior and corruption began their downward spiral with the end of WWII. The increasing competition just increased the rate of downward movement.

Back in the early ’80s, the small Oregon town I lived in experienced the recklessness of the unions.

The unions’ president and full-time reps won a hard-fought vote to strike over reduced benefits and a flattened wage in its new contract, all the while ignoring that most timber companies were closing down. There were no jobs available anywhere. They convinced the workers to strike, paying them $200 a month to sit on the picket line. Well, guess what? Scabs from out of the area came in and kept the company operating, while the local union members went broke, bankrupt and some even died from exposure. However, the union reps were still paid their regular salary. A year later, with no contract, and lower pay than originally offered, the members went back to work.

It was a prime example of unions not representing the workers; instead, they engaged in a pi$$ing contest with management. All sides lost. One mill was permanently closed, and the other had lowered productivity and compressed wages.

Unions, like our federal gov’et, would be great if they actually represented the people in helping to run things more effectively.

Efficiency is the LAST thing they want. What they want, is money and power for themselves. I left Chicago many years ago, largely because I hated the corrupt machine politics and the declining economy, which went hand in hand as they always eventually do. Now the entire US is literally under the Chicago machine writ large.

I have been making arrangements to emigrate and my plans are pretty far along. I’m not blogging because I have any illusions that the US or its economy can be saved. It can’t. Some individual states might be saved if they manage to secede. I’m blogging to create a historical record and to serve a warning to the rest of the world about what happens when a country tips over the brink.

Once I was a young firebrand with stark black beard ( now I am a graying firebrand, a bed of hot coals so’s to speak, wizen’d by years) a young strapling, newly minted president of my Local, in truth.. just a gavel banger.

Understand, I never was a communist.. never will be. Please keep this in consideration, as I unfold this short tale.

So there I was at my first State Convention, Union BAC.. what 27 ..26.. years old. Meh. It was my first experience into the world of corruption.. AKA Government. Labor/Government/Big Business… a triumvirate of evil… but I digress.

So there I was one of two from my local. The other was the B.A.(Secretary/Treasurer usually as well, in small locals they combine… and that is the real power base)… I digress again…. sigh.

Background info complete, Here is a brief look at what goes on over three days. Day One… check into hotel room paid for by rank and file union members, rub shoulders in “hospitality room” with the more equal than other pigs. Next, go to room big enough to accommodate… in this case about 300. Vote how much mileage and per diem rate we poor union reps should get…. told you…. corruption is easy to take.

Course, Art Chance was on the other side slopping his face in this same trough…. just saying. But I digress…. corruption is easy to take… no matter which side you are slopin’ from.

Any rate, that was how difficult day one was.

Fade to “Hospitality room” P A R T Y… and much discussion, truthfully it was more reserved than one may think. Yes the alcohol flowed like a kennedy transfusion, and the food was good.

Day two, the big dogs show up. That would be the AFL/CIO… I had been warned the night before(hospitality room) to curb my tongue/not make waves on day two on the floor. They make their obama like speeches.

Day two, committee assignments to address such as may be need addressed are voted in place.

Hospitality room. Yes you can get dunk there… lots of top dogs did. No AFL-CIO at least not in the room I could go to.

Any rate there was Day Three. Denver Local had their charter pulled because they voted not to take a pay cut. All say aye!

No, Fantom, I started out on the union side, too; it really is the only place to get effective training and experience in labor relations. Some people kiss the ring and stay, some take the training and experience to the employer side. In the first 15 years or so on the employer side, all my co-workers had started on the union side; that has changed now. The conflict is irrepressible today and one does not switch sides.

In my union days I didn’t know what steerage in an airplane looked like and I never paid the tab for anything except when I was picking up the tab on my union credit card for somebody whose good will was important to us. I knew how to find a fine whore, get a reservation where none were to be had, get the ticket that was sold out, and discretely get whatever recreational substance somebody important to us might want. I was always very careful to do very little of that stuff for myself because the very last thing you want is to have the people in that world have something on you or to owe them anything. I had a very successful career on the employer side and did that because nobody could ever call in a chit on me.

And unfortunately, similar pigging on the employer side is almost the exclusive province of Democrats. I always had to either be VERY discrete or very well behaved because I always knew there was somebody around looking to drop a dime on me.

Aside from the fact that unions make us non-competative, their worst fault, in my opinion, is that they foster mediocrity. Heres a little example. A number of years ago (27 to be precise), I was designing two data floors for one of the big banks in New York. Part of the construction involved installation of two IBM main frame type computers. The bank used them to keep track of literally hundreds of thousands of bond transactions every day. Once the floors were constructed, IBM delivered the two units to the site. They were downloaded off the truck at the curb by IBM technicians in white lab coats. They were there to do the installation as well. While we were unloading, three memberes of local 3 (Electrician’s Union) walked up and informed us that they claimsed the installation work because it involved electrical hookups. The IBM technicians said that they could not guarantee the operation of the equipment if they were installed by anyone but an IBM technician. These units were valued at 6.9 million dollars apiece and this was 27 years ago. I asked the shop steward if the union had any experience in installation of this type of equipment and was told “Its electrical, how hard can it be!”. I asked if they would be willing to guarantee the functioning of the equipment and they said they would not. I ended up having to pay two union electricians a days wage to stand around and watch the IBM technicians do the installation. Otherwise the union would not allow the computers to be brought onto the site. I have always found unions, those involved with construction anyway, to be self serving bullies who have no desire to do the best job possible or to raise the skill of their members.

Kasich found himself in the same place Swartzenegger found himself; everybody was saying how they were behind him in taking on the unions and when he did it, he looked around and saw how far behind him they were. Swartzenegger didn’t have a friend in the World when he took on the CA unions and hardly anybody even noticed the Kasich initiates because of all the focus on Wisconsin. If the CA and OH attempts had been nationalized the way the WI attempt was, the outcomes might have been different.

In my experience there are two ways to take on unions: you can run and get elected on a program of taking them on with a reasonable likelihood of success or you can go after their dues stream and cut it off or reduce it before you really engage them politically or at the bargaining table. Swartzenegger’s guy and I were the only two Republican-appointed state heads of labor relations in the Country at the time of the CA initiatives and we talked about it a lot since I was, at that time, the only person in the Country that had any experience with truly confrontational, concessionary bargaining in the public sector. Neither of us were optimistic because Swartzenegger didn’t control the AG or the Legislature and, thus, had no way to go after the dues before the political campaign on the initiatives. The only thing we could come up with was to try to get some interest group to identify dues objectors and try to sue to stop dues collection but that was a time-consuming long shot that tempted unfair labor practice findings and they felt they didn’t have the time and didn’t want the risk. The unions drowned him in money.

I don’t know as much about the Ohio initiative which says both that I’m out of the loop now and that it didn’t garner nearly enough National attention. On the heels of the loss in MI, though anyone who believes that is nearly over knows noting about unions, a RTW battle in OH will be an existential battle that will bring in all the resources of the AFL-CIO and the union-dominated federal labor apparatus. There will be blood! I don’t know if Kasich is one of those silly Republicans who thinks that unions will like him if he’s nice to them – there are some – or if he, like Swartzenegger decided after the initiative defeat that since the house was burning, he’d just keep warm.

In any event, if the people pushing this amendment are to have ANY hope of winning, they need to find a way to Nationalize the effort so they can get some money in the game and they need to find a way to reduce or cut off the union dues being collected in OH as well as the union dues from around the Country that will pour into OH; one is a collective bargaining and Constitutional issue and the other is a campaign finance issue. I don’t know who’s calling the shots in OH, but I know I’d be finding some PACs and public interest groups with a strong interest in the well-being of dues objectors and with a special interest in campaign finance laws.

Will Kasich in this round do as Walker did – explicity exempt first-responder/law enforcement unions from the proposed reforms? Kasich went after “everybody” and the opposition from the more “worthy” unions sealed his 2011 bills’ defeat. I’m not sure if Schwarzenneger did the same (add the correctional officers union to that mix in CA, and the task becomes that much more difficult). Illinois’ feeble pension reform referundum – to merely enable the legislature to review and possibility strike down the constitutional protections of state sponsored pensions – lost by slim margin, on the votes of otherwise conservative people worried about their grandpa’s or dad’s police pension.

I’ll be the first to admit that the only thing our corrections officers had to do was whisper CCPOA (California Correctional Peace Officers Association) affiliation in our ears and we started looking for something to make them happy. I was at a conference of LR managers and such and the CA corrections guy was there. At the time, the head of CCPOA was on leave from his job with Corrections to be head of CCPOA and on leave from his job as head of CCPOA to be on the staff of the head of the CA Senate Finance Committee, so whenever Corrections had to go try to get money appropriated to it, it had to go through the union head to get it. My state can do incest and corruption but we ain’t never had nothin’ like that.

Kasich went after “everybody” and the opposition from the more “worthy” unions sealed his 2011 bills’ defeat.

Spot on! The anti-RTW media blitz focused exclusively on these groups and in my view was the key factor in the electorate’s defeat of SB5 within moments of delivering a crushing blow to Obamacare. Yet another example of the Democrats’ seeming monopoly on the country’s best advertising minds.

There are several reasons that “SB5″ was unsuccessful. First, as Tom noted, it was an overreach. Opponents were able to rally cops, firefighters, teachers, parents of school children, and pretty much everyone who watched the towers fall on 9-11.

The second problem was that we have an awful (IMO) referendum provision in our Constitution, which turns our state into an all out free-for-all democracy any time a special interest group gets motivated. The opponents of union reform got their act together so quickly that SB5 was on the ballot before Ohioans felt any of the positive effects of the reforms (unlike WI, where citizens were able to see that the sky didn’t fall and the reforms were actually positively benefiting the state.)

The only thing low-information Ohio voters knew about SB5 going into the voting booth on Election Day was that firefighters wouldn’t have the safety equipment they needed and they were going to die. And toddlers in burning houses would die. Grandma, too. Those were the ads we were bombarded with here, thanks to millions of dollars from the national unions.

At the time, surveys reported that Ohio voters favored many/most of the provisions of the law, including right to work. The fact that the law didn’t exempt safety forces was the main sticking point for most voters (though they were exempt from many of the law’s provisions anyway, but that was lost to most voters).

Kasich is probably going to find himself between a rock and a hard place in very short order. The brutal SB5 loss sent him and many in the GOP scurrying under rocks, afraid to stick their necks out on much of anything. The problem is that the budget was balanced on the backs of local governments who are screaming for the relief they thought they would get with government union reforms. In addition, Kasich is not only now facing competition from RTW state Indiana, but he’s now going to get it from MI, which will surely hurt the jobs numbers that have been his main talking point. Not sure he’s going to be able to hang it all on Obama if he refuses to stand up to the unions.

And from a labor relations professional’s perspective, the police, fire, and corrections unions are among the worst of the lot. These are jobs that you can come into with a GED or HS diploma, no work experience, a strong back, and a weak mind, and if you can pass a background check and pee in a bottle, in a few years if you’re a unionized cop, fireman, or CO and you aren’t making $100K plus a year, it is because your supervisor doesn’t like you and isn’t giving you the OT and premium pay assignments or you’re a slacker.

Most of them around the Country can’t strike so they have interest arbitration to resolve contract formation disputes. The primary standard in interest arbitration is comparability to similar jurisdictions which basically means they get what the most profligate neighbore state or polisub is giving; it is an endless spiral. On day one of the job, there is absolutely NO difference between the guy being hired as a cop, fireman, or CO and the guy being hired as a janitor; same MQs except maybe the janitor doesn’t have to pee in a bottle. A year later the janitor is lucky to be making $30K and the cop, fireman, or CO is unlucky if he’s not making $100K. Unionized cops, firemen, and COs are working class royalty; only the true skill trades do better economically and they have to be much more qualified to get the jobs.

One of the provisions of SB5 (and one that the unions went…ahem…postal over) was to ban binding arbitration. Unfortunately, as usual, the right could not explain what that meant in sound bites. The left explained it quote effectively as “management would have all the control and the firefighters would be at their mercy.” Like taking candy from a baby.

Now their chickens are coming home to roost. I just heard the “Breaking News” that East Cleveland is going to lay off 20% of its cops. It’s not like we didn’t warn them that these contracts were unsustainable. Maybe chipping in few bucks for your Viagra RX doesn’t seem like a bad idea now, eh? Of course, Kasich will be blamed and it will probably work.

Here’s the key to the “binding” arbitration thing. We’ve been through this in AK and are the only state that has been here. It works, but you have to be brave.

Ok, so interest arbitration is binding on the Executive Branch. That public policy decision has been made into law, so we live with it. However, I don’t think there is a state constitution in the Country that doesn’t require that any Executive Branch expenditure be supported by a legislative appropriation. The Executive may be bound to the arbitrator’s award, but the state constitution says that only the Legislature can appropriate. So, the cops or firemen get a buy a new Lexus and a Vegas hottie contract and the Legislature only appropriates enough money to hire one fireman. Crystalizes their perspective and there’s nothing they can do about it except spend a lot of money to try to buy a new government.

Grrr…I wasn’t able to reply to your comment about binding arbitration in AR, so here it is, out of order.

Art said,

“The Executive may be bound to the arbitrator’s award, but the state constitution says that only the Legislature can appropriate. So, the cops or firemen get a buy a new Lexus and a Vegas hottie contract and the Legislature only appropriates enough money to hire one fireman. Crystalizes their perspective and there’s nothing they can do about it except spend a lot of money to try to buy a new government.”

The problem I see (at least it would be this way in Ohio) is that funding is a mix of state, federal, local, and county funds and they’d surely find a way around legislative approval. If they can’t use state funds for the Lexus, they’ll get the county to pay for it via a slush fund.

One of the reasons the unions threw such a hissy fit in Ohio was under SB5 they’d no longer run both sides of the table in negotiations. If it went to arbitration, first, the mediator was required to consider the legislative body’s (such as the local school board or City Council’s) ability to pay for and administer the terms of the contract. After several rounds, if they were still at an impasse, the legislative body would hold an open public hearing (!!!) in which both parties would explain their positions. The legislative body would then vote to select one or the other. The chosen agreement would then be executed and effective for a term of 3 years.

No more mediators imposing budget-breaking contracts upon local governments. The elected officials could be free to do that themselves and face the voters at the next election if they bankrupted their cities or if teachers and firefighters walked and left for greener pastures because they refused to pay them a fair wage. It sounds so lovely, doesn’t it?

@Paula -
I went and read your law, specifically 4117.08(C) which sets out the “management rights” exclusions to the bargaining duty.
First, it looks like a law written by unions with just enough rights left to the employer to keep it constitutional should an evil Republican governor or legislature try to mess with the natural order of things. My law is the same way but more clear about legislative appropriation power.

Were I the head of labor relations for a public employer under that law, as long as I had the support of the legislative body, city council, school board, state legislature, board of directors, I would do just as I discus above under my law; hold the unions hostage to the appropriation power. I think it is black letter in most of the civilized states that an arbitrator or a court enforcing an arbitrator’s award can’t make a legislative body appropriate money. They can tell you the employees you have must be paid in accordance with the negotiated agreement or arbitrator’s award, but they can’t tell you what your total budget must be and consequently can’t tell you how many employees get paid at that rate.

We’ve gone so far here as to have arbitrator’s awards rejected by the Legislature and it has been upheld by our SC (pats self on back). I think your state is dealing with what we dealt with in the mid to late ’80s with the oil price crash. From the inception of bargaining in ’72 until ’86, the State of Alaska solved collective bargaining problems with money – and there was lots of money during most of that time. Then the bottom fell out of the price of oil and we went from Blue Eyed Arabs to white trash practically overnight. The Democrat governor had given his union friends a pretty lucrative contract running from July 1, 1986 to June 30, 1986, with a 3.6% general increase scheduled for July 1, 1985, for State Fiscal Year 1986. The Legislature didn’t include an increment for the increase when it did the SFY86 budget and the Governor submitted a request for a supplemental appropriation to the ’86 Session asking for money to fund the increase retroactively to July 1, 1985, and the Legislature voted down the request for the supplemental appropriation. And the war began!

I came to work in State LR in April of ’87 and the woman who became my boss, friend, co-conspirator, and finally my counterpart when I was director of labor relations and she was director of personnel came in July of ’87. We had a new Governor, also a Democrat, but we now had a barely Democrat House and a Republican Senate and NO MONEY. The new governor had been elected with heavy union support, in large measure because his Democrat predecessor hadn’t delivered for them when the Legislature refused to fund the last year of the contract. But on taking office and getting a good look at just how far in the hole we were, he called a press conference and announced, “All bets are off.” And then the shooting started!

Nobody in State management or in LR had a clue what our rights and duties were under our law beyond the rudimentary understanding one can get from the hornbooks because most of it is based on the pre-Taft-Hartley National Labor Relations Act. Even government abhors a vacuum and while Dianne and I didn’t really know what you could do under our law, we were willing to find out and with a combination of indifference from old time managers and decent backing from the new administration we decided to find out what a public employer could actually do in concessionary bargaining under a law modelled on the NLRA, but with legislative appropriation power reserved. The war lasted until 2004 during my directorship when for the first time since ’90, the State of Alaska offered a general increase to all its employees without asking for a takeback.

Between “all bets are off” in ’87 and the general increase I offered in ’04, there are hundreds of ULPs and dozens of Labor Relations Agency Orders and Decisions, dozens of court appeals and at least a dozen AKSC decisions about the rights and contours of the duty to bargain under our law and the power of the People through the Legislature to control that duty. Since my name was on the appearance line of the vast majority of those cases at the arbitration or labor board level, by the time I was a supervisor under the Democrats beginning in ’99 and then director under the Republicans from early ’03, the unions knew that the State generally and I specifically were very well aware of the State’s rights and powers and we were more than willing to use them. And then peace broke out all over and I got bored and retired.

Democrats will never confront a union unless forced to by exigent circumstances or if the union crosses the administration. The only time I’ve ever been able to just unleash Hell on a union was when the Democrats had just had enough of AFSCME’s antics and criticism of the administration in 2000 and my boss said, “get those deleteds off my back and out of my buildings.” Republicans have to at least make the appearance of being nice, Democrats don’t. The union states have always been Democrat controlled. Democrats made them union states and the unions have kept the Democrats in control. Alaska was so thoroughly union and Democrat, practically communist in places, that it was only admitted to the union concurrently with then firmly Republican Hawaii. The oil industry changed the political dynamic such that for much of my career, collective bargaining was like Saul Alinsky pulling you one way and the Governor General of the British East India Company pulling you the other. What you have with Republican governance in union states is a fundamental lack of understanding of unions, the personalities, and the processes. When you get into conflict, there’s no case law and precedent to rely on because there’s never been any litigation or arbitral challenges to the union. We found that what we had to do was run a full-tilt critical analysis of the bargaining strategy with “if-thens” for every eventuality. Then when we got TROs late on Friday afternoons and all our principals were in a panic, we could say, see, we expected that and right here are our decision options to deal with it. It is one Helluva lot of work but it helps to make up for the one thing most lacking in political management: courage.

Anyway, this is way too long but I woke up with heartburn at 4AM and couldn’t get back to sleep. I could rattle off all that history because I’ve had to tell it to arbitrators, ALJs, and judges so many times I could do it in my sleep. And still today, or at least still through ’06 when I left, you wouldn’t be able to talk to a union rep long without them bringing up the 3.6% that we took away from them in ’86 and still owed them.

I alwasys wondered. Isn’t there some Constitutional objection to Union states laws, on the grounds that you are denied significant opportunities for work, due to the whims of a private group (groups? Hmm…

As Village Administrator for a small town in Ohio, I disagree with Gov. Kasich as well on the importance of an RTW law. We need it, and we need it desparately.

A former (Democrat) Lt. Governor asked at a meeting of local public officials for every person around the table to tell him what Ohio needs to recover as a manufacturing jobs powerhouse. So I told him.

1. Pass RTW.
2. Abolish public unions.
3. Abolish prevailing wage law for public projects.
4. Do everything in your power to promote cheap energy, instead of fooling around w dumbass wundmills and solar farms.
5. Rein in state regulation and bureaucracy.
6. Get the hell out of the way and watch the state economy take off like a rocket!

He laughed, but everything I said is demonstrably what we needed, then and now.

And let’s be honest. Local governments have felt much of the brunt of the state’s budget cuts. Local governments have to balance their budgets every year, but the public union contracts can be crippling, forcing cuts in essential services to help finance Cadillac healthcare and pension plans for public employees. I don’t envy any of them that job.

1. Pass RTW.
2. Abolish public unions.
3. Abolish prevailing wage law for public projects.
4. Do everything in your power to promote cheap energy, instead of fooling around w dumbass wundmills and solar farms.
5. Rein in state regulation and bureaucracy.
6. Get the hell out of the way and watch the state economy take off like a rocket!

I fully agree with your points! However, what everybody is — reality.

The modern day successes of the union has been tasted by the masses directly or indirectly and shall always in the the waiting in ALL RTW states. (labor chases money and benefits)

Most all industries in the manufacturing sector and other sectors, pays union scale of sorts whether unionized or not — a defensive prevention of union creep.

Human nature of our more recent modern society dictates labor wanting/demanding as much as possible for as little investments as possible.

As the parity of wealth is made more common place in the American dialog the issues of unionized labor will, I’m afraid, become more relevant on behalf od the organized labor unions.

Human nature of greed seems blind to its consequences on both sides of the table. The corrupted labor unoions played to human nature and eventually infected both sides and thus, created a circular road to destruction.

As for public unions, I agree it has NO place in any governmental structures. I’m also one who believes that any elected representative of government, including the president, should only receive a modest salary equal to the national private sector mean and a modest per deim in addition to fully being scrutinized for any possible criminal corruption. Government service should be just that — patriotic service!

If I were Gov. Kasich I would go for incremental reforms that reduce the income stream into unions. First I’d get a law passed that requires that union dues be collected from the employee instead of the employer. Also make funding union political activities a separate optional payment. That doesn’t attack the closed shop directly. Next I try to get some county-by-county opt-out of the closed shop, letting rural and Western Ohio become a right-to-work area to better compete with Indiana and Michigan. Cleveland and Toledo get to remain closed shop areas, but population and influence would gradually shift to the faster growing right-to-work exurbs. A county-by-county fight also forces the unions to waste money fighting multiple battles far from their urban centers of support.

In case nobody made the point, the closed shop has been illegal in the U.S. since Taft Hartley was passed in 1947. You can look it up.

The right’s campaign for right-to-work laws is more evidence that the Conservative program boil down to making the entire United States into a giant Mississippi, a land of bosses and serfs. Maybe you’ll succeed, but it’s also possible that you’ll wake the unions up from their long sleep.

Well, project labor agreements with use of union hiring hall labor are closed shops in all but name. You’re technically right though except for the biggest and still very legal closed shop of all, the American Bar Association, which organzation pretty reliably supports Democrats.

In Ohio, the problem is that employees who opt out of the union opt into “fair share” fees. That means they get all the costs associated with being a union member, but none of the benefits. They are still forced to fill the unions’ coffers through forced payroll deductions, but they are not voting members of the union and in the event of a strike, receive no union benefits. It would be considered criminal behavior in any other business endeavor.

“But because the federal government and virtually no states have codified the Beck ruling into law, workers must attempt to collect individually, while resource-rich unions are free to drag out and otherwise resist such requests.”

You have to remember that until the ’10 election all the union states except Alaska and California had Democrat governments. NO Democrat government has any interest in even acknowledging the existence of Beck and its public sector counterpart Hudson and they’re more than happy to pay lip service to whatever scheme the union devises to hide what it spends on non-chargeable costs and keep agency fees for objectors as high as possible. The reason the percentage of objectors is so low is, first apathy, but more importantly, the unions have been allowed to deprive objectors of the right to vote about the very things they’re allowed to charge objectors for, true collective bargaining activities. In other words, an objector has to pay for the costs associated with negotiating an agreement, administering an agreement, and, to a limited extent, to lobbying for approval or funding of said agreement by a legislative body. But, after having paid for the negotiation of a contract, an objector can’t vote on its ratification, any grievance resolutions reached under it, any modifying letters or amendments, etc. Many, many more public employees would be come objectors and agency fee payers if it didn’t deprive them of the right to vote on contract ratifications. I think the state of the law is just wrong, but the new members of the Republican controlled union state club are very new to the game, the game is far from over, and they have a lot on their plates.

We could have done it in the Murkowski Administration but we had a lot on our plates and actually thought at the beginning of the administration that we were facing an existential battle with our unions because of budget shortfalls. We played tough with them, they behaved as the result, and the price of oil went up. Somewhere on this computer I still have a memo I wrote to the COS about some difficulties we were having with our maritime unions in trying to bring some new high-speed catamaran day boats into service. I said to him, “Hell, Jim, the price of oil is over $50/bbl. this week; let’s throw some money around and get off the front page of the Anchorage Daily News.” We did insist that all of our contract language become facially legal on dues issues. Hudson has been black letter law since ’86 and we still had contracts requiring membership rather than just fee payment, so we fixed that, but, frankly, since they were behaving, we were not interested in being agressive towards either their jurisdiction or their security except as a bargaining tactic. I did stare down our biggest one, the AFSCME local, with taking them to impasse with a threat to impose terms and stop enforcing their union security clause. They saw reason when it became clear we really were going to do it and they came to terms we could accept.

People should understand as well that open shops and no dues checkoffs are not an unmixed blessing to the employer. No doubt they significantly weaken unions, especially politically, but they do so at the price of having union reps slithering around your property all the time trying to stir up controversy to get employees interested in supporting the union and just trying to collect dues. Given my druthers, if I could get an agreement I could live with, I’d give them their union shop and their dues checkoffs so the union business manager could spend more time at his house in Palm Springs cavorting with his Vegas showgirl and LEAVE ME ALONE.

And, if you really just want to weaken unions politically you can do it within existing law by having your AG agressively go after the union’s dues scheme. There was a good line of cases coming up through the circuits right after Beck that place the burden on a public employer to assure that dues schemes requiring dues as a condition of public employment met Constitutional muster as set out in Hudson. It all died during Clinton and I’ve not seen anyone resurrect it. I know it was in my tool kit of things we could do to bring ours to heel if we needed to “go nuke” with them, but they decided they were better off to fight another day and behaved for my three and a half years in charge. They’ve actually behaved pretty well since I left in ’06 though the Palin and Parnell administrations have given them all sorts of stuff they shouldn’t have – mostly because they just didn’t know any better. Some of it will come back to bite the state one day when they have another Democrat governor. Republicans are as bad as Democrats about not thinking about what the other guy will do when he gets his hands on that new toy.